OPTIMAL LOCATION OF ACTION POTENTIAL GENERATION BASED ON ACTIVATION FUNCTION USING COMPUTATIONAL MODELLING

Abstract

Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation is used to elevate health-related disorders. This technology is now an important therapeutic system for medical science. In this system, the electrical current pulse is applied over the skin through the inner layers via electrodes to activate excitable tissue layers. Activating other excitable tissue layers may cause discomfort. Thus, it is vital to design electrode configuration arrangements to activate the target anatomical layers without affecting the neighboring ones. A device for primary headaches showed mixed results. This may be related to the electrode position that requires higher stimulus current levels to activate target nerve fibers. This may stimulate neighboring nerve fibers which resulted in the discomfort of patients. A feasible solution is to identify the optimal electrode configuration based on the activation function which is the second derivative of the electric potential along an axon. This may guide to estimate of the possibility of action potential generation on the neural tissue layer using a specified electrode arrangement. In this study, the multilayered human head was developed based on MRI data set using pre and post-processing. Then multi-electrode arrangements were developed to examine the possible nerve activation location. Results showed that the nerve fibers were activated at the same location of the trajectory for the anodal and cathodal stimulation. This may be proof that the activation function can be used to define the optimal location of nerve activation. This may lead to lower thresholds for similar therapeutic benefits in transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation with decreased power consumption.

Keywords

• Action Potential
• Activation Function
• Extracellular Potential
• Finite Element Simulation

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